Consider this: Shrinking ice cover

What does it mean when Wolf Lake in the remote High Peaks area of the Adirondack Mountains loses three weeks of ice cover in winter, as scientists affiliated with the State University College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse recently determined?

It means that the lake’s water chemistry may start changing, along with the types of algae that bloom in the water and plankton that live in it. Warmer water could harm cold-water fish species — like the heritage brook trout that flourish in one of the most pristine lakes in the Northeastern United States.

In short, less ice could alter the lake’s entire ecology. And keeping track of ice formation on the lake, as environmentalists have done at Wolf Lake for decades, is one of the most reliable measures you can get of climate change. “Lake ice doesn’t lie,” says ecologist Colin Beier, lead author of the Wolf Lake study, published by the journal Climatic Change.

The evidence of climate change is everywhere, not just in the Adirondacks, which scientists consider a key “transition zone” between temperate and cold-climate ecosystems, unusually sensitive to temperature variations. Beier and his colleagues at the Adirondack Ecological Center in Newcomb studied four other lakes in the region and found similar reductions in ice cover. Scientists elsewhere have reached the same conclusions in their own lake studies. In nearby Vermont, a study in 2008 found that over the past four decades, the point where temperate maple and beech trees gave way to cold-weather spruce and balsam had moved 400 feet up the mountains.

The mounting evidence of ice shrinkage should also shrink the reservoir of skeptics who continue to deny the reality of climate change.